“One week after a U.S. Geological Survey study warned that caribou ‘may be particularly sensitive’ to oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the agency has completed a quick follow-up report suggesting that the most likely drilling scenarios under consideration should have no impact on caribou,” The Washington Post [reluctantly? nah!] reports.

The new, two-page report, obtained by The Washington Post, was written by the same scientist who led the original caribou study. The new report, commissioned by Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton almost immediately after the initial report came out, bolsters the Bush administration’s case that drilling can proceed in the Alaska refuge without harming the fabled Porcupine caribou herd.

But drilling opponents derided the latest review as a desperate act of political intervention by Norton and her aides. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) said he found it ‘hard to believe’ that a seven-day review could provide better information than a report surveying the scientific literature about Arctic wildlife from the past 12 years.

But Joe, the new report comes from the same scientist who led the original study on caribou calving. Is he lying now that the new report is out? Or was he lying before — when the report appeared to bolster your environmental “concerns”?

Or, more likely, does this new report simply clarify the science in order to take into account actual drilling scenarios — as opposed to “potential threats” to caribou populations based on implausible methods of development in the region? Let’s see:

The initial report, which was not as devastating to drilling as the sound bites suggested, supplemented the existing caribou literature with a new peer-reviewed model predicting calf survival rates under various development scenarios. Environmentalists had seized on the report’s conclusion that a drilling scenario covering the refuge’s coastal plain could significantly harm the Porcupine caribou, which use the area for calving and foraging and as a refuge from predators. Even drilling supporters fretted that the study could doom the drive for development, which is languishing in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Sources said that before the initial report was released, Interior officials objected to its emphasis on the potentially damaging full-development scenario, which they say is not plausible. Tom Weimer, Norton’s deputy assistant secretary for water and science, set up a conference call with the scientists who conducted the report, as well as Norton aides including senior adviser Drue Pearce, a former Alaska state senator who later worked as a consultant for an Alaska oil development company, and special assistant Camden Toohey, the former director of an Alaska lobbying group dedicated to drilling in the refuge.

That led to a March 29 memo by USGS Director Charles Groat accompanying the report’s release. In the memo, Groat said he was ‘concerned’ that the five ‘fictional development scenarios’ the report assessed were not the ones being evaluated by Congress and that he was asking the scientists who led the study to analyze new scenarios. Groat was appointed to the job by President Bill Clinton, who opposed drilling in the refuge [my emphasis].

So, to recap: The original report — based on numbers gleaned from implausible worst-case scenarios (themselves based on non-existent development scenarios) — was trumpeted by environmentalists as proof of the potential devastation to ANWR drilling and development might lead to. A follow-up report, however — by the same scientist — concludes that, based on the actual drilling plans under consideration by Congress, no damage to caribou herds would likely result.

This poor scientific research team: they went from environmental heroes to earth-hating goats in the course of one week — all because the evil Gale Norton and her oil-loving cronies pressured them into factoring into their study the actual methods of oil development under consideration. Methods that weren’t even under consideration — but that had the salubrious effect (from the environmentalist’s point of view) of damning the project altogether — were given less emphasis.

Reached for comment, former Vice President Al Gore noted, “Science is stupid.”

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